If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

reterieving data??

Hi all,
I am kinda little stuck with this.Seeking your help on this. Infact the problem is that we tried to run a ghost image on machine from a USB storage and someone removed the USB storage even before it started.
Now when I tried to reboot the system it gave me the ugly "disk not found" error. I popped in couple of live distros(astrumi and Knoppix) and tried to mount the hard disk. I was unable to mount the internal hard disk with the live distribution.(Since knoppix can mount during the boot). I tried to mount it by

"mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/hd"
and it gave me an error of "invalid block device or bad superblock". So i was unable to munt the hard drive. Now I popped in Windows XP cd (since the OS is Windows XP SP 1a) and tried to do a "fixmbr". But the machine is automatically turned off when it tries to configure and detect the hardrive.So unable to do that as well.

Please note that I can see all the partitions healthy and active when i use some partitoning tool (fdisk,partd). I hav'nt formattd it, since the data in the partition is valuble.

Any suggestion on this would be appreciated.
Thank you all for bearing me all along.

Do I understand correctly? You have a ghost image on an USB device and want to put it back to your system? Apparantly in that case the restore mechanism did write some data to your harddisk and that made it corrupt. When you're putting a ghost image back on your system then it will remove the contents that is already on it so a format and then a restore from the ghost should solve it. The data currently on your system would be lost, though. But that's what happens when you put back a ghost.

Hi Ommy from your flag (if I have interpreted correctly) I hope that all your family and relatives are OK?

What I wanted to say, was that you sould try putting the USB device in then dismounting it..........but with maybe 50,000 dead.............I pray for you................computers seem a bit irrelevant?

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

If i am reading this right when you say partions you mean that you have a system partition and a data partition. If that is the case you should be able to tell your imaging software to only overwrite the system partition and that way you keep the data intact. If the important data is on the system partition you will need to use something like ntfsdos or bartCD to recouver the data before redoing the disk. You could also try to take the disk out of the machine and put it into another with a clean OS and copy the data that way.

Warning this may invalidate your warrenty.

ALso as Nihil said, if your flag is right, then i hope all your family and friends are safe.

\"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.\"
\"The reason we are so pleased to find other people\'s secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own.\"
Oscar Wilde(1854-1900)

As MURACU sugeested...slave the disk into another machine and pull the data off

Personally I find this the best way to get the data off a drive...
that way you can the start mucking with the system and partition...and you have the data stored safely off the disk you will be mucking with

Hi Ommy from your flag (if I have interpreted correctly) I hope that all your family and relatives are OK?

ALso as Nihil said, if your flag is right, then i hope all your family and friends are safe.

Ditto

MLF

How people treat you is their karma- how you react is yours-Wayne Dyer

Overwhelmed

everyone,
umm..I am overwhelmed with the kind of concern you guys have shown regarding the earthquake disaster here in Pakistan. I was not expecting it at all. All I thought was that I am amongst the geeks of security who would give a damm to the rest of world and stay busy in what they do. But I am glad that its not like this.

nihil,MURACU,morganlefay yes I and my family and friends are absolutely fine(Though the jolts were very scary and I have never been through such intense feeling in my life ever before.) The disaster was more towards the north side of Pakistan. And it is very sad that the death toll is rising every day. Locals have shown great concerns and there have been instances where they donated everything they owned for the relief. International community is even showing a great concern towards the disaster. May I take the opportunity, to request you all, for raising a fund for relief and sending it to the Pakistani government through your local government.Please, do let me know, if i can be of any help in this regard.

[Problem] Yes Katja, you understood, what I wanted to convey. but you know, we all make mistakes at one time or the other. What matters is that we give them an opportunity to learn. I,myself have transitioned alot technically, since my first post on Antionline (though, I hav'nt been posting alot but I am on Antionline for like for more then 4 years). We cannot afford to lose the data.

I am thinking of slaving the disk today and use some tools (ntfsundelete, ntfsdos) with it.Besides MURACU, the data was residing in the system's partition (since it was a user profile). Any further suggestion with that??
[/Problem]

I "thank you" all for your concern regarding the disaster. Atleast it brought a pleasant smile to me.

I did think of another option you could try and that is to make an image of the disk and then try to use an image explorer to extract the information from the image. I know drive image pro lets you modifiy the images after they are created. Ghost lets you do the same with ghost explorer.
Still slaving to a machine is probably the easiest that way you just copy the files you need from one disk to the other and then you are free to re-ghost your original disk.

\"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.\"
\"The reason we are so pleased to find other people\'s secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own.\"
Oscar Wilde(1854-1900)